A study showed that scientists can wirelessly determine the path a mouse walks with a press of a button. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, created a remote controlled, next-generation tissue implant that allows neuroscientists to inject drugs and shine lights on neurons deep inside the brains of mice. The revolutionary device is described online in the journal Cell. Its development was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health.
“It unplugs a world of possibilities for scientists to learn how brain circuits work in a more natural setting.” said Michael R. Bruchas, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine and a senior author of the study.
The Bruchas lab studies circuits that control a variety of disorders including stress, depression, addiction, and pain. Typically, scientists who study these circuits have to choose between injecting drugs through bulky metal tubes and delivering lights through fiber optic cables. Both options require surgery that can damage parts of the brain and introduce experimental conditions that hinder animals’ natural movements.
To address these issues, Jae-Woong Jeong, Ph.D., a bioengineer formerly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked with Jordan G. McCall, Ph.D., a graduate student in the Bruchas lab, to construct a remote controlled, optofluidic implant. The device is made out of soft materials that are a tenth the diameter of a human hair and can simultaneously deliver drugs and lights.

By Ariel Sabar
In televised remarks from the East Room of the White House on April 2, 2013, President Obama unveiled a scientific mission as grand as the Apollo program. The goal wasn’t outer space, but a frontier every bit as bewitching: the human brain. Obama challenged the nation’s “most imaginative and effective researchers” to map in real time the flickerings of all 100 billion nerve cells in the brain of a living person, a voyage deep into the neural cosmos never attempted at so fine a scale. A panoramic view of electric pulses pinballing across the brain could lead to major new understandings of how we think, remember and learn, and how ills from autism to Alzheimer’s rewire our mental circuitry. “We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions,” the president said, “but billions of people on this planet.”
The next month, six miles from the White House, a Harvard professor named Florian Engert grabbed a mic and, in front of the nation’s top neuroscientists, declared Obama’s effort essentially futile. “We have those data now,” said Engert, who, in a room full of professorial blazers and cardigans, was wearing a muscle shirt that afforded ample views of his bulging biceps. “We discovered they’re actually not all that useful.” (“I think whole-brain imaging is just a bunch of bull----,” is how he put it to me later.) To the other researchers, he must have sounded like a traitor.
Engert, who is 48, was basically the first person on the planet to observe a brain in the wall-to-wall way Obama envisioned. He and his colleagues had done it with a sci-fi-worthy experiment that recorded every blip of brain activity in a transparent baby zebra­fish, a landmark feat published just a year earlier in the marquee scientific journal Nature. For Engert to suggest that the president’s brain quest was bunk was a bit like John Glenn returning from orbit and telling JFK not to bother with a lunar landing.

By Nellie Bowles
One recent Friday night, at a software-development firm’s warehouse in San Francisco, Mikey Siegel called to order the hundred and fifty or so meditators, video gamers, and technocrats who had gathered for one of the city’s biweekly Consciousness Hacking meet-ups. Siegel, the primary organizer of the event and the founder of a Santa Cruz–based biofeedback startup called Bio Fluent, asked the crowd, men and women of widely varied ages, to go around the room introducing themselves in three words. Everyone laughed, but took the task seriously. The introductions moved quickly through the room in a brisk beat:
“Me Technological Cartoon”
“Heather Curious About Brains”
“Neuromore Singularity Atom Here”
“Dan Thoughtful Helpful Software”
“Harry Self-Modification Exploration”
“David Psychiatrist Technological Retarded Curious”
“Jordan Moving Meditation Butts”
“Juliana Joel’s Aunt”
“Ben Existence Existence Existence”
“Zohara Chocolate Maker Meditation Awareness”
“Lila Awake Empath Warrior”
San Francisco’s Consciousness Hacking meet-ups are an opportunity for engineers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to test the fleet of still experimental self-examination technologies emerging largely from Silicon Valley. The region’s tech community is a body culture, obsessed with monitoring and perfecting its food (Soylent), fitness (Fitbit), and physiology (23andMe). As brain-wave technologies get cheaper and more popular, some company founders hope that consumers, who seem to be acclimating to devices like the increasingly ubiquitous Fitbit, will consider other, more cumbersome devices and procedures. Consciousness Hackers are a kind of self-selected early market-research group. Tonight, that was especially clear.

By Amanda Montañez
As someone who works at the intersection of art and science, I have always found it easy to make the case that all artists are scientists. From the moment we pick up a crayon and make our first mark, we are experimenting. The perceived successes and failures of our craft are indelibly tied to the many variables—physical, chemical and psychological—inherent in the experiences of creating and consuming works of art.
Yet, it seems a longer stretch, somehow, to argue that all scientists are artists. At the very least, in my experience, scientists seem less willing to claim this alternate title. In fact, almost anyone who does not see her or himself as artistically inclined tends to be a little too quick to proclaim, “Oh, I’m not an artist. I can’t even draw a straight line!” With a sigh, I’ll avoid the temptation to digress into the utter irrelevance of straight lines and one’s ability to draw them. Instead, I’d like to posit the idea that, while we may not all identify as artists, scientists, of all people, really should be artists.
Throughout history, much of scientific discovery and advancement has hinged not just on our ability to see certain things, but also on our capacity to reproduce what we see in faithful, critical and/or meaningful ways. The drawings of the famous Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal provide an ideal example of this phenomenon.
In the late 1800s, using a novel histological staining technique developed by Italian physician Camillo Golgi, Ramón y Cajal spent countless hours examining brain tissues under the microscope and recording what he saw in pen and ink.

by Kate Solomon
Jean-Dominique Bauby famously wrote The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by blinking as an assistant read out the alphabet, but locked-in patients could soon have a much easier way to communicate.
For the first time, scientists have successfully transcribed brainwaves as text, which could mean that those unable to speak could use the system to "talk" via a computer.
Carried out by a group of informatics, neuroscience and medical researchers at Albany Medical Centre, the team managed to identify the brainwaves relating to speech by using electrocorticographic (ECoG) technology to monitor the frontal and temporal lobes of seven epileptic volunteers. This involves using needles to record signals directly from a person's neurons; it's an invasive procedure requiring an incision through the skull.
The participants then read aloud from a sample text while machine learning algorithms pulled out the most likely word sequence from the signals recorded by the EcOG. Existing speech-to-text tools then transcribed the continuously spoken speech directly from the brain activity.
Error rates were as low as 25 percent during the study, which means the potential for the system is pretty vast. The findings could offer locked-in and mute patients a valuable communication method but it also means humans could one day communicate directly with a computer without needing any intermediary equipment.

By Neuroskeptic |
Neuroscientists might need to rethink much of what’s known about the amygdala, a small brain region that’s been the focus of a lot of research. That’s according to a new paper just published in Scientific Reports: fMRI measurements of amygdala activation are confounded by stimulus correlated signal fluctuation in nearby veins draining distant brain regions.
The amygdala is believed to be involved in emotion, especially negative emotions such as fear. Much of the evidence for this comes from fMRI studies showing that the amygdala activates in response to stimuli such as images of scared faces.
However, according to the authors of the new paper, Austrian neuroscientists Roland N. Boubela and colleagues, there’s a flaw in these fMRI studies. The problem, they say, is that the amygdala happens to be located next to a large vein, called the basal vein of Rosenthal (BVR).
fMRI works by detecting blood oxygenation, so changes in the oxygen level in the blood within the BVR could produce signal changes that could be mistaken for activation in the amygdala. Because the BVR drains blood from several brain regions, some of which are themselves involved in emotion processing, the BVR could act as a proxy for emotion-related neural activation elsewhere in the brain, which is then projected onto the amygdala.
Neuroscientists have long been aware of potential large vein contributions to the fMRI signal, but it hasn’t generally been seen as a serious concern. According to Boubela et al., however, the problem is serious, when it comes to the amygdala.

Andrew Griffin
Companies are taking out a huge amount of patents related to reading brainwaves, according to analysis, with a range of different applications.
Fewer than 400 neuro-technology related patents were filed between 2000-2009. But in 2010 alone that reached 800, and last year 1,600 were filed, according to research company SharpBrains.
The patents are for a range of uses, not just for the healthcare technology that might be expected. The company with the most patents is market research firm Nielsen, which has 100. Microsoft also has 89 related patents.
Other uses of the technology that have been patented include devices that can change the thoughts of feelings of those that they are used on.
But there are still medical uses — some of those patents awarded include technology to measure brain lesions and improve vision.
The volume and diversity of the patents shows that we are at the beginning of “the pervasive neurotechnology age”, the company’s CEO Alvaro Fernandez said.
"Neurotech has gone well beyond medicine, with non-medical corporations, often under the radar, developing neurotechnologies to enhance work and life," said Fernandez.

By Rachel Feltman
This is either fascinating, incredibly creepy, or both. Probably both. But also science!
The video wasn't created for an all-MRI production of "The Wizard of Oz." It's an example of a high-speed, high-resolution MRI technique. The technique, which is being developed by the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group at the Beckman Institute, acquires about 100 frames per second. A description of the technique was published Tuesday in the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Working about 10 times faster than a standard MRI, the machine was able to pick up the muscular nuances required for singing.
You can see the vocal folds hard at work creating the tune. These two flaps inside the larynx sit over the windpipe, coming together whenever we're not breathing. Air passes through the closed folds, causing them to vibrate. We use our larynx to control the tension of our vocal folds, which changes the pitch of our vocalizations.
The researchers weren't just goofing off in order to display the MRI's capabilities: The high-speed and high-resolution images help them keep tabs on the tongue and neck muscles during vocalization. They're hoping to learn more about what health vocalization looks like, and whether or not singing can be used as a therapy to help the elderly regain more control over their speech.

By Antonio Regalado
Various powerful new tools for exploring and manipulating the brain have been developed over the last few years. Some use electronics, while others use light or chemicals.
At one MIT lab, materials scientist Polina Anikeeva has hit on a way to manufacture what amounts to a brain-science Swiss Army knife. The neural probes she builds carry light while collecting and transmitting electricity, and they also have tiny channels through which to pump drugs.
That’s an advance over metal wires or silicon electrodes conventionally used to study neurons. Anikeeva makes the probes by assembling polymers and metals into large-scale blocks, or preforms, and then stretching them into flexible, ultrathin fibers.
Multifunctional fibers offer new ways to study animal behavior, since they can record from neurons as well as stimulating them. New types of medical technology could also result. Imagine, as Anikeeva does, bionic wiring that bridges a spinal-cord injury, collecting electrical signals from the brain and transmitting them to the muscles of a paralyzed hand.
Anikeeva made her first multifunctional probe while studying at Stanford. It was crude: she simply wrapped metal wires around a glass filament. But this made it possible to combine standard electrode measurements with a new technology, optogenetics, in which light is fired at neurons to activate them or shut them down.